Highlighting the actually not-so-secret world of mass food production, and product manufacturing in general. Streamlining is cheaper, hence single producers are contracted by various brands and chains to supply their needs. They’ve been doing it for decades. (That branded thing you like? There’s probably an own-brand equivalent that is literally the same product.) But there’s a cost for this efficiency, whether relatively benign (like ‘metallic-tasting’ hummus) or more significant from a public health standpoint (see the horse meat scandal, which was really about not knowing what was in the food, rather than that thing being horse meat). #link

Sigh. ‘Pivoting’ is great for start-ups and VCs, who must believe it’s a virtue to be so nimble. It’s not so good for their employees or contractors, those who supply the necessary labour, who can’t possibly be expected to follow suit. And it’s all in the service of an ad market that doesn’t have a metric for (and therefore, doesn’t understand) the way advertising works now. [c/o Kottke.org] #link

“The future will not have the nine till five. Instead, the whole day will be interspersed with other parts of your life. Scheduling will become freeform.” Ah, the privilege of having a career one loves to the point where work/life balance is no longer a relevant concern. #link

Midori Takada’s 1983 LP Through The Looking Glass. Prompted by this short profile in the Guardian upon its recent reissue, which has promptly sold out. And it isn’t available digitally, for some stupid reason. So here you go. #video

Hmm, two letter-sized things from the US appear to have gone missing in the post in the last six weeks#tweet

I’m glad Formulas Fatal to the Flesh was my intro to Morbid Angel; it’s still a very good album#tweet

Got my bicycle back from the shop. Will hit the road for a long ride next week, I think#tweet

Jonathan Demme (RIP) never made another horror after The Silence of the Lambs, but it’s so good he might’ve thought he couldn’t top it#tweet

Bass lesson #2: screw chords, I'm sticking with intervals. Also I worked out the bassline for the Minutemen's 'The Anchor' without tab#tweet

What a treat this is: a genuinely funny, sweet and touching comedy-drama about a non-traditional family and the unique creature who shakes up their lives. But it arrived before most people cared about such things, and doesn’t fit neatly into the Disney canon, so is unfairly overlooked (even by me, hence why it’s taken me so long to see it).

The first ‘straight’ genre pastiche from the Astron-6 collective, The Void is a film very much in thrall of its influences in lieu of its own worldbuilding: it’s basically Carpenter’s The Thing, Prince of Darkness and a few others crossed with Fulci’s The Beyond, by way of Hellraiser and Stuart Gordon’s Lovecraft flicks. What’s more, the awful lighting makes it largely impossible to appreciate the practical effects, which are Empire Pictures weird-veering-on-hokey rather than other-worldly terrifying, so I don’t know why they bothered. I didn’t hate watching it, though.

Yoshitoki Ōima’s slice-of-life manga perhaps naturally loses some of its plot clarity and character development in the translation to the big screen, compressing an 18-month-long story into a two-hour movie and all that. But the spirit is intact, as a disconnected group of teenagers – one of them deaf – try to mend the wounds they inflicted on one another when they were younger and knew no better. Emotionally genuine, and beautifully animated. Very much recommended if you liked Toradora!

Maybe it’s just me, but I have a feeling that genre filmmaking is a more welcoming place for women to get a foothold, whether telling their own stories or just telling good stories full stop. But I’m not a filmmaker or a woman, nor do I know any in the industry. #link